Severe heat costs the Australian economy US$6.2 billion a year

Heat stress costs the Australian economy a whopping US&dollar;6.2 billion a year – a finding that shows what other countries might be facing in areas where global warming will make extremely hot days more common.

Kerstin Zander from Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, and colleagues surveyed 1726 employed people to map the impact of hot weather on the economy.

People reported taking an average of 4.4 days a year off work because of heat stress. And 70 percent of respondents said heat had made them less productive on at least one day in the past 12 months, with a third saying it often did so.

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Delving deeper into the results, the team calculated that heat-related absenteeism was costing the country US&dollar;845 per head of population per year. The figure for loss of productivity at work was even higher at US&dollar;932.

Conservative estimate

“The figure is quite conservative,” says Zander. The researchers used lost income as a proxy for the decline in a person’s economic output due to heat, but many people are underpaid for their contribution to the economy, she says.

Losses in productivity were strongly correlated with how much physical exertion people’s jobs involved.

Zander notes that the survey period covered a record-breaking hot year in Australia. “But the year before that was also record-breaking and [the current] year is hot too,” she says, noting that the climate is clearly warming so hot weather will be more and more common.

“This study shows heat stress is already responsible for about as much lost productivity as general illnesses,” says Steven Sherwood from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

He says that billions of people live in tropical areas where many workers have to stop working in the middle of the day. “In the future if there is significant global warming, the impacts here [in Australia] will become more like those currently in the tropics.”

Zander says as the climate warms, the costs of particularly hot days might be greater in cold countries because they aren’t used to hot weather. “Australia was already hot so we are [better] adapted,” she says.

Sherwood says researchers now need to join the dots between models of extreme heat’s impact on productivity today, and those showing how the temperature will change.